Hair as fabric: backstage at Collina Strada in Copenhagen

Most of what happens in a salon is quiet, careful work. Someone sits down, you listen, you take your time, and they leave looking like a better version of themselves. Fashion week is the opposite of that. It is loud, fast, and the brief is usually some variation of make it strange.

In August, Holly travelled to Copenhagen to work with KEVIN.MURPHY at Collina Strada’s Delirium in Bloom presentation, staged as part of Copenhagen Fashion Week’s twentieth anniversary. Hair direction came from Eugene Souleiman, KEVIN.MURPHY’s Global Professional Ambassador and one of the most influential session stylists working today.

Here is what happened, and — more usefully, if you sit in our chairs in Burnley — what comes home from a week like that.

A collection made from its own past

Collina Strada’s creative director Hillary Taymour built Delirium in Bloom without sourcing a single new material. Everything came from what the label already had: fabrics, trims, notions and remnants accumulated across its own history, then pleated, twisted, layered, patchworked and sculpted into something that no longer resembled where it started. The show notes described it as farming the past to find a new path forward.

That constraint set the tone for the hair. Souleiman has spoken about approaching hair not as a hairdresser would but as an artist would — treating it as a fabric, because that is essentially what it is, and taking it out of the salon entirely.

Couture Disco

The first of the show’s two hair directions took the classic updo somewhere considerably less polite. Each one was built organically on the model rather than planned in advance, which is a genuinely uncomfortable way to work if you are used to a set finish.

The base was prepped with FRESH.HAIR and ANTI.GRAVITY to create texture, body and volume that would actually hold a shape, then manipulated into abstract, sculptural forms. SESSION.SPRAY was layered in throughout as the shape grew, so the hair became structural — part of the architecture of the look rather than a covering over it. Souleiman described the effect as an updo caught in a storm somewhere in the galaxy.

The results were deliberately imperfect and completely individual to whoever was wearing them.

Space Fairy

The second direction pulled everything back towards the head and pushed the finish further out. Souleiman saturated the hair with SESSION.SPRAY and used it almost as a gel — spraying it flat and close to the scalp, wetting the hair, then compressing it under a net. Tinsel and glitter went in afterwards, giving the whole surface a reflective, faintly extraterrestrial quality.

His inspiration was aerial imagery from the Hubble Telescope: sparkling gas, intense colour, strange astral formations. He wanted the hair to read as otherworldly and interplanetary, and bright and beautiful at the same time.

Made from the same world

The clearest link between the hair and the clothes was material. Just as Taymour rebuilt the collection from Collina Strada’s archive, Souleiman worked actual fabric from previous Collina Strada collections directly into the hair — carrying the label’s philosophy of reuse past the clothes and onto the models themselves.

He put it more memorably than we could: if Victor Frankenstein had been a hairdresser, this is roughly how he would have gone about designing hair.

What comes back to Burnley

Nobody is walking out of Manchester Road covered in tinsel. That is not the point of going.

The point is that session work strips out every safety net you rely on in a salon. You are building on a head you have never seen before, to a brief that changes as you go, at a speed that does not allow for second-guessing. It teaches you what a product will genuinely do rather than what the label claims, how far you can push a texture before it collapses, and how to read hair fast — and that reading is exactly what a good consultation is.

It also means the KEVIN.MURPHY range on our shelves is not a stock decision. Holly is a KEVIN.MURPHY Diamond Key Educator, so the products we sell are ones she has worked with under real pressure and teaches other stylists to use. SESSION.SPRAY holding a metre-high sculpture together backstage in Copenhagen is a reasonable indication of how it will handle a Saturday night in Burnley.

If you want the thinking behind a look rather than just the look, that is what a consultation is for. You can see the full hair services we offer, meet the team, or browse the KEVIN.MURPHY range to take a bit of it home.